After seven years in a California prison, the would-be LAPD squad car bomber comes home in dead silence to her native Minnesota.

"Former 1970s militant and longtime fugitive Sara Jane Olson returned to her St. Paul home on Wednesday evening [March 16] to try to put her life back together after seven years in prison."
– Minneapolis Star Tribune,  March 17

She is a woman who could not outrun her dark radical past. On the lam for 25 years, she must have thought she escaped her long day's journey into radical darkness. Her quarter-century of hiding in plain sight was triggered initially by her decision to place shrapnel-laden pipe bombs under LAPD squad cars, and being accessory to a bank heist murder in Carmichael, California, in 1975.

During the bank robbery, a woman depositing church offerings from the day before, was gunned down in cold blood, for no apparent reason, by a member of the wild-eyed radical 1970s' group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

Sara Jane Olson, alias for Kathleen Ann Soliah, a red-haired Scandinavian born to modest parents in Barnesville, Minnesota in 1947, and raised in Palmdale, California, was an unlikely candidate for joining in SLA violence. Called shy, even withdrawn by childhood friends, she expressed herself in class plays and in book reviews recited from behind oversized glasses.

Yet she was a tub-thumping, speech-making member of the SLA, the radical leftist-anarchist group of hate-Amerika crazies infecting our country in the '70s. They engaged in bloody shootouts with police (they called them pigs), burned down houses, kidnapped and held for a $6 million ransom — before proselytizing her to favor their "causes" — newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. The term absolute loonies might best describe them.

They also robbed banks for fun and to support their whacks at the thin blue line and an Establishment they hated.  

Slipping back home last week to her native Minnesota, Sara Jane Olson (she changed her name officially after being charged as Soliah), was all quiet. Nary a word to waiting reporters about what she had learned, maybe, from two trials and seven years in prison. Family and friends embraced her, scooping her up at the baggage claim at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport for the 15-minute drive to her ivy-covered home in the upper-middle class Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul.

She offered not a nod, or a wave, to waiting reporters. No statement today, an anonymous friend told the waiting reporters.  Her car sped by them, into her home's attached garage, out of sight, for unloading.

Neighbors strolled by, some with dogs on leashes; a few wondering why the commotion on their street. Trucks with satellite TV antennae pointed skyward stood at the ready to broadcast something, anything, a glimpse of the convicted felon, maybe a celebrity wave, in time for the 6 p.m. newscasts.  They went back empty. 

On her return Sara Jane was "wearing a tan trenchcoat and a happy smile," said the Star Tribune. Her once-dishwater blond hair had now turned, as if bleached, into silver-gray, and was put up in a bob. She wore dark sunglasses, hiding the beginnings of crows feet at the corners of the Nordic blue eyes, evident in prior still photos of the convicted felon. Seven years in prison had not been kind to Sara Jane.

Her husband, Gerald (Fred) Olson, MD, drove his one-time fugitive wife home from the airport, right into their attached garage, thus "dodging a sea of reporters and photographers," says Star Tribune.

A woman who answered an obtrusive knock at her door by a pesky reporter said: "My mother is home and she's happy. Please give us privacy."

Her return to the state of her birth had been challenged by Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and the Los Angeles Police Protection League, the police union, as illegal. They had requested she stay in California for the term of her parole.  (A bill at the Minnesota Legislature supporting Governor Pawlenty's request was NOT taken up by the Democrat-controlled House and Senate. Call this, ah, "interesting"?)

Sara Jane's subdued return was a far cry from her arrest in June 1999. At first, she denied heatedly she was Soliah. (Fingerprints did her in.) Caught in that lie, next she insisted she was swept up helplessly back then in the vortex of radicalism of the 70s, in the wake of the Vietnam War. 

Back then she gladly talked to news media. She'd plead the circumstances made her do the SLA's bidding.  Often she'd promote sales of her cookbook, proceeds going to benefit her legal defense fund and her bail bond money. (She was once released on $1 million bail into the arms of her loving husband.  It was her last snippet of freedom.) 

Sarah Jane was the very picture of hubris: no remorse, no apologies.

At first she was charged only with placing pipe bombs to kill the "pigs." Later she was convicted also of conspiracy in the murder in 1975 when SLAers robbed a bank.  In that bold robbery, with masked Sarah on hand, a fellow SLA member murdered a bystander, depositor Myrna Opsahl, mother of four, for no reason at all. 

Sara Jane hid for a while incognito in North Dakota with her grandparents, then moved to Seattle, taking a job and becoming a community theater player.  Her stage name and pseudonym was  "Nancy Bennett."  She moved back to her native Minnesota to meet and marry a respected St. Paul surgeon who had done volunteer medical work in war-torn Africa.

Sara Jane became a "DFL" activist, hosting fund-raisers for her like-party friends. (In Minnesota, DFL stands for Democrat Labor Party.)  One of Sara Jane's best pals was State Senator Sandra "Sandy" Pappas (DFL-St. Paul).  She served at the time as Chair of the Senate's Law Enforcement Committee. No kidding.

Sara Jane helped Pappas during her campaigns, doing door-to-door bell-ringing, and hosting St. Paul fundraisers.  Upon learning Olson had been arrested,  Pappas was outraged (OUTRAGED!).

In a hissy-fit, Senator Pappas said in a snit the FBI ought to be ashamed of itself for not "searching for the real criminals." Evidently, placing pipe bombs under squad cars in California, at least, did not quality as crime, hate or otherwise.  After all, they were only "pigs."  Another Friend of Sara Jane (called FofSJ) called her arrest, and upcoming prosecution, a "witch hunt," of all things.  

A front-page Star Tribune headlined support for the then-alleged felon thusly:  "Support mounts for a jailed revolutionary." (One would think, perhaps, Patrick Henry had been arrested?) Soon, reality set in. Sara Jane capitulated, sort of, admitting to her criminal past. Once she retracted her guilty plea, then reinstated it. The lady, it seems, was confused.

Sales of her 100-page cookbook, jovially titled "Serving The Time: America's Most Wanted Recipe," dropped off to zero after her conviction, no longer hyped by media.  (A St. Paul newspaper guy I know wondered aloud if the cookbook had a recipe for cooked goose. Every dark side has its lighter side.) 

Sara Jane served half of a 14-year sentence. Her prison behavior was exemplary.  Her arrest in 1999 blew her cover as a devoted wife, soccer mom, community theater actress and Democrat party activist . By all accounts she was a gracious, outgoing, friendly hostess, the perfect doctor's wife, a loving super mom to their two daughters.

In this sense, her arrest then was another tragedy.

As a University of California, Santa Barbara, firebrand, Soliah gave speeches at SLA rallies, such as at "Ho Chi Minh Park" in Berkeley, exhorting folks to take up arms against their country. Then there were the crimes that eventually did her in. 

Airing of the fugitive's tale on TV's America's Most Wanted led to her 1999 arrest, it is believed, at the doorway of the same ivy-covered home she returned to last week.

Later, when Sarah Jane was also convicted in a second trial, of being an accessory to murder in the Crocker National Bank robbery in Carmichael, she displayed no remorse, except for silently dabbing away tears with an ample white hankerchief. (Were the tears for her, one wonders, or the murder victim Myrna Opsahl's family? Both?)

At the post-sentencing victim's statement, Jon Opsahl, now grown-up son of the victim, called Soliah-Olson and the convicted SLAers, ". . . a group of monsters, pathetic, deranged revolutionaries who simply decided one day to make my mother instantly and permanently expendable."

On March 16, 2009, Sara Jane Olson, the "1970s' militant," was released from prison after seven years, returning home again wearing a "a tan trenchcoat and a smile" behind darkly-tinted sunglasses, sans public comment after doing her time. Criminal acts have consequences.